Scenic Route
by GuardianSaiyoko
Summary: Persona 4  In retrospect, allowing someone who thought the things growing in the deepest recesses of his uncle's fridge were edible to make lunch for the team was a Bad Idea.


**Disclaimer: **Written for a BadBadBathhouse prompt involving the Investigation Team accidentally getting high. Also, Yosuke has mild expressive aphasia going on because that happens to me when I'm tired or tipsy and it's damned annoying, but amusing at the same time.

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**Scenic Route**

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The third time something innocent Chie says sets him off, snorting and laughing helplessly like Yukiko at one of Teddie's bad puns, Yosuke realises maybe something's wrong.

"Partner," he gasps, still unable to stop laughing, "What- what the hell did you feed us?"

Chie starts snickering again. "'Partner, what the hell did you Egypt?'" she mocked. "Got somebody in mind there, Yosuke? I _thought_ you paid more attention in a couple classes..."

Had he seriously just said Egypt? The thought made him laugh harder. "No... lunch... what was _in_ it?" he gasped out.

"Dunno," Souji mumbled. He had tilted his head back and was staring at the sky, intently. "Some stuff I found in the fridge... needed to be cleaned out, and I didn't want the food to go to waste, and it all _looked_ edible..." He trailed off, pointed to a random cloud, or maybe a shadow falling across the roof or a plane, he can't seem to decide which direction to look in. "One of'em looked kinda like that."

"...that's a leaf, partner."

"Leafy vegetables are good for you," Souji argues, gaze darting to Yosuke, suddenly intense.

Yosuke grew serious again himself, laughter finally trickling to a halt. "Not all of them are edible!"

"Everything is edible. Chew harder."

That statement made Yukiko, Rise and Chie all laugh so hard Yosuke was irrationally afraid Naoto, closest to the edge, was about to fall off the roof. He dove to grab her arm and missed by a good foot.

Souji snickered.

"Mystery Food X isn't edible no matter _how_ hard you chew," Kanji mumbled.

Naoto was looking between the rest of the team, bewildered. She'd insisted she wasn't hungry, but had agreed to join them all on the roof for lunch 'for the sake of companionship.' Eventually, though, Kanji had convinced her to share his portion- and she was having trouble concentrating. Her eyes seemed to want to track on one of the other IT members, but her mind seemed to be having difficulty deciding who, and so her gaze kept snagging on odd objects.

And she was _still_ better off than everyone else, Yosuke realised in a fleeting moment of sobriety.

"We can't go back to class like this," Naoto muttered, raising a hand to her head.

Kanji put his head down and shook, trying to stop laughing, which set Yukiko and Rise off again. "Then we need to go somewhere else," he reasoned when he mustered the air for it.

"But where can we go where no one will..." Chie trailed off, blinking hard.

Yosuke surprised himself by completing her thought at almost the same time as Yukiko. "The TV, there's a TV in the science lab."

Only instead Yosuke says something like, "The Eeevee in the tech squad," but that isn't what he heard and no one calls him on it this time, so he has no idea why Yukiko has broken into another fit of giggles.

"There's no one in there now, right?" Kanji said, throwing the remains of his lunch to the floor for some unlucky (or lucky) wildlife to go through later. "Let's run for it!"

They _do_ run, giggling and shushing each other, Souji holding his hand and yanking him behind corners, Chie humming the theme from some American action movie, Rise forgetting that she can't summon a Persona to scout ahead in this world, Souji giving orders like they're in battle (but quieter, thankfully). Yosuke's amazed, in a vague sort of way, that they make it to the science lab without being caught.

"Through the TV," Yosuke whisper-shouts, and everyone else hears "Throw the melee!" and they end up having to shove and scramble and shimmy through a too-small television as fast as they can before the sound of laughter brings a teacher down on them.

Normally, they've all been very cautious to not use any TVs but the one at Junes, not knowing where the others go. No one is in a state to think of this as they tumble through into a heap, a tangled sprawl of limbs. It takes everyone a moment to separate and scramble to their feet again.

Yosuke has no idea where they are. None of them had stopped to consider the possible consequences of entering a world that manifested people's subconscious on a regular basis while they're in this state.

The world itself is a tangled mess- it's mostly the studio they usually arrive in, but one edge trails off into wilderness twisting into the lab twisting into the bathhouse and then back into wilderness, and another edge drops off into a black abyss with a single ladder swaying dangerously out over it, and way at the top of the ladder is what Yosuke _thinks_ could be a guitar, which makes absolutely no sense to him.

Also, there's a tree growing in the middle of the studio where the TVs usually are. Yosuke's still trying to make sense of it when the girls and Kanji are several branches into the tree and still climbing.

For that matter, he's still trying to make sense of it when Souji offers him a hand up and he starts climbing, too. Hell, he's not sure what's going on even when they've all made it to the tree-house way at the top, the studio entirely out of view from up here, and the tree-house is actually more like a tree _mansion_. There's a bunch of wooden rooms connected to walkways and ladders and ziplines and it's not long before they're all running around like a bunch of kids, giggling and urging each other to races on the walkways and in Kanji's case swinging from the branches and hollering like he's Tarzan.

"Sensei?" Teddie's puzzled voice breaks into Yosuke's happy fog and he looks down to see a very, very confused bear on a platform below them. "Sensei, I smelled all of you in here but something seems... wrong..." Teddie trailed off and watched wide-eyed as off to their right Naoto launched herself off a branch, caught a vine, and swung up into another level of the treehouse, cackling gleefully all the while.

"Oh shit," Yosuke giggled, looking around for Souji so that he can share his sudden breakthrough. To his surprise, Souji's still right beside him. "Partner, shit, you know what this means? Teddie's the responsible adult here!"

At that, Naoto's cackling above them becomes suddenly so severe she starts gasping for breath.

Even though Yosuke had misplaced and transferred words in his sentence, both Souji and the Detective Prince understood him, and Souji's doubled over with laughter again, leaning heavily on Yosuke for support.

Teddie looks lost. "Of course I'm a bear."

That just makes them laugh harder.


End file.
